Speakeasy

Speakeasy, Inc. was a broadband internet service provider and voice over IP carrier based in Seattle, Washington, United States. Their terms of service described liberal usage policies for home users allowing subscribers to run any number of servers and allowing them to resell their connectivity to others through a service called "NetShare". They received press coverage for their support of Linux and BSD-derivative operating systems, and were reportedly the first provider to offer a customized version of Mozilla Firefox to customers, in January 2005. The company was acquired by MegaPath Corporation in 2010 which retired the Speakeasy brand. MegaPath in turn was acquired by Fusion Connect which currently houses Speakeasy's network and customers. History In 1994, Gretchen Apgar and husband Mike opened a cybercafe in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood with Mike's brother Tyler. They started out with offering connectivity and email services in the area. Customers at the cafe expressed a wish to have the ability to check their email from other locations than just the cafe and a series of terminal stations were set up at various bars around town. These terminals were marketed under the label, "Rainmail." As computing power expanded and the cost of computers diminished, customers began to express the further wish to access their email from home. Speakeasy put together a bank of modems and offered a dial up service. As of 2008, dialup through Speakeasy is still available for $19 a month. The move toward DSL took place in 1998. In late 1999, the company expanded to a national level, offering DSL services throughout the United States. The Speakeasy backbone consisted of a dedicated fiber ring that circled the continental United States with major points of presence (i.e. POPs) in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Washington D.C., New York, and Chicago. From the POP to the customers premises a third party vendor was contracted to provide data layer connectivity. This is known in networking as the 'last mile'. In the case of Speakeasy, the data-link protocol used was Asynchronous Transfer Mode rather than PPPoE or Frame Relay in case of T1's.